Pat Thompson, who has died aged 89, was one of the most influential members of Oxford University's history faculty. He was born in Preston, Lancashire, the son of a civil servant, and moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1923. He lived there until 1936, when his father was transferred to the Inland Revenue in London. It was at Dulwich college, in south-east London, that Thompson – born Arthur Frederick – acquired the nickname "Pat". He went to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1939 to read history and was taught by both the medievalist Bruce MacFarlane and AJP Taylor.

Thompson took first-class honours in modern history in 1941, then joined the Worcestershire Yeomanry and trained as a glider-paratrooper. He was wounded during the Normandy campaign in 1944 and spent the rest of the second world war at Bletchley Park. Once it was over, he returned to Oxford as a graduate to work on 19th-century political history. In 1947, he went to Wadham College as a history tutor (partly because of his admiration for its warden, Maurice Bowra) and remained there, with spells as visiting professor at Stanford in California and McMaster in Ontario, until his retirement. He was deeply attached to Wadham, where he was domestic bursar, senior tutor, tutor for graduates (a role he created) and sub‑warden.

At Magdalen, Thompson had been unusual in following Taylor rather than MacFarlane, and his interests were increasingly 20th-century as well as 19th. His first published article, in 1948, was on Gladstone, and the focus of his work thereafter was on the "radical" or "progressive" tradition in recent British history – at a time when the bias of historiography was towards the medieval and early modern periods.

With Hugh Clegg and Alan Fox, he founded what became known as the "Oxford school" of labour history. It was distinctive in its attention to trade-union history, the history of the Labour party and the social and legal development of industrial relations. In this it had connections to the work of Henry Phelps Brown and (in labour law) Otto Kahn-Freund.

Perhaps the most representative example of this school is the first volume of A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, published in 1964, which Thompson wrote with Clegg and Fox, the political sections being Thompson's. Although their work was not overtly ideological or propagandist, it was clearly sceptical of some of the claims made by other forms of social history – especially those influenced by Marxism – as to the uniqueness and self-awareness of working-class life. Thompson saw working-class politics as part of a wider political radicalism, with its roots in Gladstonian liberalism. He retained a close interest in Gladstone all his life, and was a leading member of the committee which oversaw the publication of Gladstone's diaries, most of which were edited by his graduate student Colin Matthew. One of Thompson's uncompleted projects was a biography of John Morley, Gladstone's biographer.

Thompson did not write as much as he would have liked; he was a perfectionist. In graduate supervision, however, he found a creative compensation. He was an outstanding supervisor. At a time when Oxford had relatively few tenured historians of the late-19th and 20th centuries, but many graduates who wanted to study that period, his role was central and influential. He was the best kind of critical reader, careful and intolerant of loose argument or style. And he imparted the virtues of the Oxford school – close attention to sources and an unwillingness to accept conclusions that could not at least be partly grounded in fact. His innumerable graduates colonised universities throughout the English-speaking world. He and his wife Mary (whom he married in 1942 and to whom he was devoted) acted in loco parentis for generations of foreign students for whom Oxford at Christmas without the Thompsons might have been a grim place indeed.

Mary and his eldest son Alan predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter Ruth, son Johnny and grandson Paul.

Ross McKibbin

Melvyn Bragg writes: Pat Thompson was one of two remarkable history tutors at Wadham College, Oxford, and I had the good luck to be there. The other was Lawrence Stone. Together they passed on their passion for and deep knowledge of history to many undergraduates. I first met Pat when I went up for a scholarship at Wadham. I remember a kindly man who puffed away at a pipe and was very easy to talk to. Like many people for whom Oxbridge had simply not been on the radar until their late teens, I found it a foreign and rather weird experience. Pat made it as easy as could be.

As a tutor, two things distinguished him. When you turned up with your essay once a week and read it to him, you knew you were in for a treat. In beautifully formed sentences, he would deliver a gloss and a deeper view to your callow offering. It was very much like listening to His Master's Voice. He seemed to go into a dream of the time and the subject and it streamed through him to feed your furiously scratching pen, which attempted to gather up the pearls. The other reaction was, again most politely and courteously expressed, one of qualified or sometimes unreserved criticism. It used to start gently, somewhere in the area of "this just won't do ...", but then moved quite swiftly to the, still courteously spoken, "it's all balls, old boy".

He was tremendously encouraging. Interested in what we were doing in drama, in films, and keen to add to his infinite store of college gossip, Pat was a college man and he loved everything about it. He and Mary would invite us to their house, which was always a delight and a privilege. I was lucky enough to know his family and to keep in touch with Pat over the years. My best fortune of all came last year, when we went to lunch in Oxford and spent more than three hours together. I'd never spent as long with him on my own. Above all, he wanted to exchange news about the others he had taught. I had a sense of a man whose academic life had given him deep satisfaction, which is what he passed on to his pupils.